What continues to confound many corporate treasuries is the difficulty in assessing a bank's abilities in implementing a proposed solution in a seamless and consistent manner across all countries. In the past, when banking products were subscribed to and implemented on a standalone basis, it was sufficient for banks to focus on ensuring documentation was executed, the service set-up was completed and the customer trained in its use. As solutions have become increasingly complex and integrated across the full range of cash management products, implementation has become more than just an efficient execution process. Success demands a proactive and consultative engagement with the customer as well as robust project management skills. Companies have begun to realize that the more complex the solution and the wider the geographical reach, the more critical the need for an accurate assessment of the bank's implementation resources, processes and methods.
With the increasing number of companies that have either centralized or outsourced parts of their business processes, implementing a new cash management solution can involve many parties outside the organization and across the globe. Added to that are the complexities of today's cash management solutions and the need to integrate them into a company's processes. It is not difficult to imagine how a company and its various subsidiaries, its vendors and its customers can all be affected by a new system. New bank accounts, an Internet banking platform and interfaces with enterprise resource planning systems all entail development and process changes. With different stakeholders come different objectives, perceptions and motivations, some of them conflicting, which further challenges the implementation process. Managing such changes then becomes key to achieving a successful implementation. Furthermore, the fluid business environment that companies currently operate in can sometimes cause unexpected changes to cash management requirements. The implementation process must be able to respond quickly to these changes in project scope and timelines, and the impact should be easy to identify and measure. Given the above, it is apparent that the traditional approach of focusing on execution to deliver solutions will no longer suffice. We have determined that there is a need to embrace a collaborative process that focuses on the customer, seeks to understand how the solution affects the company and its stakeholders and/or customers/clients and/or users, and makes the process of change more manageable.
A critical element in making this collaborative step is efficient information exchange among all parties involved in the end-to-end implementation process. For example, a client or customer and company (e.g., bank) personnel (and also those from any third party vendors involved) not only require access to a single and shared source of project information, but also to dynamic project management tools that facilitate the management of project tasks, issues and risks and progress tracking